The Trump administration has been pretending, despite abundant historical and contemporary evidence, that the only discrimination that occurs in this country is against white men and Jews. This game of let’s pretend has reached an absurd level with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s proposal to eliminate a long-standing requirement that large companies and federal contractors file annual reports detailing the composition of their workforces by race, ethnicity, gender and rank.

Without the reports, called the EEO-1, how is anyone to know which companies might be discriminating against Black and Hispanic workers, without filing a civil rights lawsuit forcing disclosure of the employment data? That appears to be the point, no matter the bogus rationale offered by administration officials, reasons drawn from the conservative Heritage Foundation, no friend of people of color.

It’s a preposterous game of hear no discrimination, see no discrimination, being played by the federal agency whose very mission is to monitor employers and root out unfair workplace practices.

The landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 authorized the collection of the data. For the last 60 years, the EEOC has been requiring the annual reports from companies with at least 100 employees and federal contractors with at least 50.

In the past, the federal agency reached out to companies and entire industries about suspect patterns in an effort to nudge them to change their ways and do better. If companies didn’t, the EEOC conducted investigations and sued them for civil rights violations.

The agency shares relevant reports with the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs in the Labor Department, which does its own due diligence.

Outside government, civil rights lawyers have used the data as a starting point in shaping cases against employers that discriminate. Academic researchers and journalists have analyzed the annual reports to expose hiring patterns that don’t line up with the labor markets and populations from which companies’ workers are drawn.

A 2023 Banner story, for instance, revealed that of 17 large employers in Massachusetts, the median percentage of Black and Hispanic employees in 2020 was 14%, far below their 31% of the state’s population. The workforces of only three companies exceeded the Black-Hispanic proportion of the state population. That story and a follow-up article were based on reports obtained from the Labor Department through a Freedom of Information request.

Without the annual reports, those kinds of stories that might compel company executives to revise their practices or provide their employees of color with fodder to press for change can’t be produced anymore.

It will become harder to file discrimination lawsuits. The administration says it wants the EEOC to focus on “intentional” discrimination. One thing the Civil Rights Act did change: No employer in their right mind goes around announcing they discriminate any longer. Barring a slip up that is documented and discovered at trial, proving intent is a high, often insurmountable, barrier.

The administration also says it wants the EEOC to no longer pursue “disparate impact” cases, a most insidious institutional form of racial-ethnic discrimination. This happens when a company adopts hiring criteria or search practices that exclude a disproportionate share of workers of color.

The recommendation to eliminate the annual reporting requirement comes from—you guessed it—Project 2025 produced by the Heritage Foundation.

The conservative think tank in D.C. claims the reports lead to racial-ethnic quotas, that old canard. Really? Over 60 years, that didn’t happen in Massachusetts, as the Banner’s stories demonstrated, or anywhere else in the country for that matter. Where are the quotas?

At this point, the EEOC is only proposing to end the annual reports. To change the existing rule, the proposal must be published in the Federal Register and be opened for a period of public comment. That will be high time for Black and Hispanic leaders—and white allies too—to express their opposition, vigorously.

Ronald Mitchell
Editor and Publisher, Bay State Banner